SIOUX FALLS S.D. (KELO) — The Sioux Falls area was without 911 cell phone emergency access for six hours Tuesday night, according to Assistant Fire Chief and Director of Metro Communications Michael Gramlick.
The outage began at 6:58 p.m. and returned at 1:56 a.m. Wednesday morning. Text access to 911 was still available and landlines still had telephone access.
At the Sioux Falls city briefing on Wednesday, Gramlick said the outage was a result of the ongoing hurricane and tropical storms in Texas. Other states also experienced similar outages. Gramlick compared the outage to a similar event in the state in April.
“We will continue to look to the state as is our standard process and look to them to provide further updates,” Gramlick said.
An emergency notification was issued to cell phone users in the state. The notification gave the city’s administration phone number as a point of contact for emergencies and a link to the City of Sioux Falls website, wherein the website crashed, according to Gramlick.
“We use alerts like these for typical events, usually during weather alerts and something similar, we haven’t had these types of outages until recently,” Gramlick said.
Gramlick said they are working on streamlining the communication in alerts like these when outages occur.
“Last time, the more info we gave, the more confusing it was,” he said.
Gramlick described the outage as a larger infrastructure concern and the team has discussed filing a formal complaint against Lumen Technologies.
